has taken the online dating world by storm. The app lets users swipe through photos of prospective partners, and if both parties like what they see, it puts them in touch. Now that idea is being applied to the jobs market.

, a newly launched employment website presently focusing mainly on technology jobs, shows users a series of job descriptions. Each includes details of the company, its location and a one-sentence description of the job. If they are interested, they click the thumbs-up button; if not, they hit thumbs-down.

The employer sees similar employee cards, on which CV highlights appear as “key points”. If both parties click thumbs-up, employer and jobseeker are put in touch.

Founder Adam Saven says finding jobs this way is much more time-efficient than searching on well-known employment sites, which can throw up thousands of results. “A user just can’t handle that many opportunities at once,” he says.

Emjoyment will shortlist the most suitable jobs using an algorithm that considers your requirements, location and CV. And as you give jobs a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, the system learns to narrow its searches to better match what you want.

The website will be complemented by a smartphone app, due to launch next month.

Brett Putter, a recruiter and managing partner at in London, says the idea has promise. “There could be something here. As with all marketplaces, they are going to have to populate it with valuable content for the target audience. Suitable jobs pushed to a user’s smartphone, however, could be valuable.”

Although dogs are said to be man’s best friend, it doesn’t mean they “get” us. At least, not like elephants seem to. Without any training, the giant herbivores can understand and follow our hand gestures – the first non-human animals known to be able to do so.

Elephants have lived alongside humans for between 4000 and 8000 years. Despite their potential to be tamed, though, elephants have never been domesticated in the same way as dogs, cats and agricultural animals have.

This hasn’t prevented them from developing a number of human-like skills. In the wild, they are famously empathetic towards one another. In captivity, elephants have displayed a degree of self-awareness by being able to recognise themselves in a mirror. Others have developed the teamwork necessary to coordinate and complete a task.

In fact, one elephant has even learned some basic phrases in Korean – and another has been taught to paint by its parents. Arguably it was only a matter of time before they added another skill to their impressive repertoire.

Hidden talent

Pointing gestures are common enough among humans: from an early age babies naturally recognise the meaning behind them. We know that chimpanzees and even seals can do this too, but not without hours of training. It comes as a surprise, then, to discover that elephants can find hidden food once it is pointed out to them – without any prior lessons.

“Elephants are cognitively much more like us than has been realised,” says Richard Byrne at the University of St Andrews, UK. “This makes them able to understand our characteristic way of indicating things in the environment by pointing.”

Byrne and his colleague at St Andrews, Ann Smet, ran tests on 11 captive African elephants in southern Africa. Each elephant was presented with two buckets – one containing food, one without. A human stood between the buckets, pointing towards the food. The elephants chose the correct bucket 68 per cent of the time on average. One-year-old children perform at a similar level, choosing correctly 73 per cent of the time on average.

Elephant sense

The investigation doesn’t stop here: another study, published earlier this year, . There are several potential reasons for this – for instance, the method used in the Asian elephant study was slightly more complicated. It involved placing the two buckets on a table that was then pushed towards the animal after a pointing gesture was demonstrated. It will be worth performing the simpler bucket-pointing test on Asian elephants to see if they truly are incapable of understanding pointing gestures, says Byrne.

The elephants’ ability to understand pointing is particularly surprising considering how poor their eyesight is, he adds. Elephants rely on smell and sound far more than anything else – their eyesight is similar to that of humans with a form of colour blindness called deuteranopia, or “green blindness”.

Although elephants are known to “point” with their trunk in the wild, biologists have assumed that they were simply sniffing the air. These results suggest that the elephant’s trunk potentially acts as a tool of communication as well.

Journal reference:

“I BELIEVE connectivity is a human right, and that if we work together we can make it reality.” These were the lofty ideals Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed on 20 August, when he declared his intention to – that is, the fraction of humanity that currently lacks it.

With tech giants like Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Qualcomm as partners, Zuckerberg’s newly formed consortium looks to have the corporate muscle to achieve such a monumental vision.

But the specifics, at least for the moment, are fuzzy. Zuckerberg’s 10-page statement talks of three broad objectives: making apps and other software more data-efficient; devising a way to make building access to the internet a profitable enterprise in its own right; and at the same time making online access affordable for all – which effectively means “free”.

Making apps more efficient is the low-hanging fruit. Data compression algorithms – like those that create zip files – are used all the time. For companies like Facebook, which pay fees to transfer vast amounts of data around the internet, the incentive to squeeze down your photos, wall posts and “likes” into a slimmer data package is clear. To this end, Facebook is already trying to reduce average data usage on its Android app from 12 Mb a day to 1 Mb.

But the bigger question remains unanswered. How do you build a vast network to reach people who, in many cases, can’t afford access to running water, electricity or medical care?

“The fundamental problem is whether the infrastructure is in place. Do these countries have a ‘backbone’, like BT fibre, which they can use?” asks Colin Beeke, a technology specialist at the University of West London.

Partner companies could help here. Qualcomm, for example, based in San Diego, California, makes chips for wireless communication devices, and played a key role in devising the 3G and 4G standards used by cellular networks across the developed world. The company predicts data demand will grow 1000-fold over the next decade. As it focuses on meeting those needs, it could find cheaper, more efficient data transmission methods that could have a trickle-down effect in the developing world.

If that pans out, there is some evidence that content providers would be willing to make their products freely available to mobile users. Since 2010, Facebook has formed partnerships with mobile data providers in developing countries to “zero-rate” Facebook’s mobile traffic, so that it doesn’t count against users’ paid data plans. The Wikimedia Foundation has followed suit. Its project allows people in several developing countries, primarily in Africa and Asia, to read the Wikipedia online encyclopedia in their native language without being billed for the data.

Of course, every company wants an opportunity to grow its market, and will have competition. Google has its own lofty plan for the developing world: involves floating thousands of balloons about 20 kilometres up in the stratosphere and beaming down Wi-Fi signals to otherwise unconnected regions. It may sound like pie in the sky, but they are ahead of . In a test in June, Project Loon flew 30 balloons over New Zealand, allowing a few lucky locals to get online, absolutely free.

ÁŞ will have competition. Google has its own plan for the developing world”

This article appeared in print under the headline “A connected world”

WATCHING Andrew McPherson play his new piano is a slightly strange experience. Sometimes his fingers push down on the keys as normal, but at others they waggle or slide all over them. That’s because his keys have sensors to bring the sounds, flair and versatility of string instruments to the piano.

Developed by a team led by McPherson of technicians, composers and musicians at Queen Mary, University of London, TouchKeys allows pianists to try out musical techniques that were previously unimaginable on a keyboard.

Each key is fitted with a set of 26 sensors that work much like a smartphone’s touchscreen to detect touch. The sensors know exactly where a finger has been placed, letting the player experiment with sounds. For example, waggling the finger on a key creates the sound of vibrato, often heard from a violin. Sliding it up and down the length of the key bends pitch, like a rock guitarist does. When I tried it out I found the movements intuitive. The vibrato was easy enough, but the pitch slide was a little harder to pick up.

Algorithms prevent the keyboard from going out of pitch or being triggered unintentionally, such as when pianists move their fingers to prepare for future notes or change hand position. The finger waggle to create the vibrato sound only works when your finger moves fast enough, for example. The team are later this month to raise funds to commercialise it.

TouchKeys is not the only new concept for piano-playing. A design called the uses soft, squashy keys that you can bend or twist to create unusual new sounds. McPherson says he is a “big fan” of Seaboard but that while that design is trying to reimagine piano-playing in its entirety, Touchkeys keeps the classic keyboard design intact.

“I’m trying to preserve the feel of the keyboard so an experienced pianist can pick it up right away, while adding a range of new expressive techniques,” he says. “Ultimately we are both looking at the same musical ideas: continuous expressive control under the fingertips. We’re just coming at it from different angles.”

“The piano preserves the feel of a keyboard, while adding a range of new expressive techniques”

To test the system, the team gave eight pianists a musical score to play on the new keyboard. They found that they were able to play it with little practice, triggering incorrect vibrato only 9 per cent of the time. Watch McPherson play his keyboard in the video above

This article appeared in print under the headline “Sensitive keyboard lets pianists create new sounds”